Related papers: Min-Max Optimization Requires Exponentially Many Q…
The problem of minimizing the maximum of $N$ convex, Lipschitz functions plays significant roles in optimization and machine learning. It has a series of results, with the most recent one requiring $O(N\epsilon^{-2/3} + \epsilon^{-8/3})$…
Recent applications in machine learning have renewed the interest of the community in min-max optimization problems. While gradient-based optimization methods are widely used to solve such problems, there are however many scenarios where…
It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…
We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points ($\| \nabla F(x) \| \leq\epsilon$) in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local…
We present an accelerated gradient method for non-convex optimization problems with Lipschitz continuous first and second derivatives. The method requires time $O(\epsilon^{-7/4} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point,…
Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…
This paper resolves a longstanding open question pertaining to the design of near-optimal first-order algorithms for smooth and strongly-convex-strongly-concave minimax problems. Current state-of-the-art first-order algorithms find an…
In this paper we present a first-order method that admits near-optimal convergence rates for convex/concave min-max problems while requiring a simple and intuitive analysis. Similarly to the seminal work of Nemirovski and the recent…
Minimizing a convex, quadratic objective of the form $f_{\mathbf{A},\mathbf{b}}(x) := \frac{1}{2}x^\top \mathbf{A} x - \langle \mathbf{b}, x \rangle$ for $\mathbf{A} \succ 0 $ is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization.…
Many statistical estimation procedures lead to nonconvex optimization problems. Algorithms to solve these are often guaranteed to output a stationary point of the optimization problem. Oracle inequalities are an important theoretical…
We study the smooth minimax optimization problem $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is $\ell$-smooth, strongly-concave in ${\bf y}$ but possibly nonconvex in ${\bf x}$. Most of existing works focus on finding the…
This paper studies the stochastic nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization over a multi-agent network. We propose an efficient algorithm, called Decentralized Recursive gradient descEnt Ascent Method (DREAM), which achieves the…
This paper considers minimax optimization $\min_x \max_y f(x, y)$ in the challenging setting where $f$ can be both nonconvex in $x$ and nonconcave in $y$. Though such optimization problems arise in many machine learning paradigms including…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…
This paper studies second-order methods for convex-concave minimax optimization. Monteiro and Svaiter (2012) proposed a method to solve the problem with an optimal iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ to find an…
We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…
This paper studies the complexity for finding approximate stationary points of nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) smooth minimax problems, in both general and averaged smooth finite-sum settings. We establish nontrivial lower complexity…
A major approach to saddle point optimization $\min_x\max_y f(x, y)$ is a gradient based approach as is popularized by generative adversarial networks (GANs). In contrast, we analyze an alternative approach relying only on an oracle that…
This paper studies the complexity of finding approximate stationary points for the smooth nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yf(x,y)$. Under the standard first-order smoothness conditions where $f$ is…